GoatCounter VS kawipiko

GoatCounter — GoatCounter is an open-source web analytics platform available as a hosted service (free for non-commercial use) or self-hosted app. It aims to offer easy-to-use and meaningful privacy-friendly web analytics as an alternative to Google Analytics or Matomo. The free tier is for non-commercial use and includes unlimited sites, six months of data retention, and 100k pageviews/month.

> Not sure when GoatCounter started

"Hello, world" - arp242 committed on May 28, 2019 - 66a4d7f9b7af8dccacaf3ad8a9fb57a9f9008030 - https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter/commit/66a4d7f9b7af8dc...

Location: Ireland (Galway)

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: yes

Technologies: Go ("Golang"), Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Linux, Unix, PostgreSQL

Résumé/CV: https://www.arp242.net/cv/cv-martintournoij

Email: [email protected]

I've been using Go as my primary language for the last seven years, although I don't overly care about the specific language and have experience with a wide variety of tools and languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, C, JavaScript, Lua, and probably some more. While I've mainly focused on backend in the last few years, I also have written plenty of frontend code over the years, from the "pre-jQuery" days to VueJS.

In the last few years I mainly focused on GoatCounter (https://www.goatcounter.com) with the occasional contract job, but I'm keen to start working on something new for the longer term.

I've got quite a bit of code on my GitHub, so you can take a look at that if you want: https://github.com/arp242/

I suggest using analytics that you can self-host, like https://www.goatcounter.com/ and renting a cheap vm to run it on along with your blog. It is way better, you have more control and you can be sure that javascript tracking is working for 100% of people using the site since you have full control over it not getting blocked by adblockers.

I'm self-hosting GoatCounter and using it across all my websites.

Apart from controlling my data, I also have more accurate visitor statistics, as it doesn't get picked up by script blockers, unlike GA.

https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter

https://www.goatcounter.com

I first used basic google analytics but found it too invasive/heavy so I switched over to https://www.goatcounter.com/.

For comments, most solutions were also too heavy, paid or had ads, but I finally found https://giscus.app/.

So while I did add these 2 features, I'm happy with those variants that I managed to find.

Location: Ireland

Remote: yes

Willing to relocate: yes

Technologies: Go ("Golang"), Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Linux, Unix, PostgreSQL

Résumé/CV: https://www.arp242.net/cv/cv-martintournoij

Email: [email protected]

I've been using Go as my primary language for the last seven years, although I don't overly care about the specific language and have experience with a wide variety of tools and languages such as Python, Ruby, PHP, C, JavaScript, Lua, and probably some more. While I've mainly focused on backend in the last few years, I also have written plenty of frontend code over the years, from the "pre-jQuery" days to VueJS.

In the last few years I mainly focused on GoatCounter (https://www.goatcounter.com) with the occasional contract job, but I'm keen to start working on something new for the longer term.

I've got quite a bit of code on my GitHub, so you can take a look at that if you want: https://github.com/arp242/

[the author here] Indeed didn't mention anything about the shared webhosting solutions, just as I didn't mention anything about S3 + CloudFront, or Backblaze B2 + a CDN in front, or Cloudflare + WebWorkers, or AWS Lambda, or any other thousand ways to do it... (Like for example there is <https://redbean.dev/> which I find just so intriguing, and not far from my own <https://github.com/volution/kawipiko> proposal.)

Although shared webhosting is part of our web history -- and still a viable choice especially if you have something in PHP or something that requires a little-bit of dynamic content -- I don't think it's still a common choice for today.

It's somewhere in between dedicated cloud-hosting, because although you have an actual HTTP server (usually Apache or Nginx) that you can't configure it much because it's managed by the provider, thus it gives you the same features (and limitations) as an a proper cloud-hosted static site solution (such as Netlify); and between self-hosting because of the same reasons, having an actual full-blown HTTP server, but one you can't fully control, thus it gives you fewer features than a self-managed VM in a cloud provider or self-hosted machine. Thus unless you need PHP, or `htaccess`, I think the other two alternatives make a better choice.

The issue with "static sites", due to the de-facto requirements in 2022 imposed by the the internet "gatekeepers" (mainly search engines), is that they aren't "just a bunch of files on disk that we can just serve with proper `Content-Type`, `Last-Modified` or `ETag`, and perhaps compressed"; we now need (in order to meet the latest hoops the gatekeepers want us to jump through) to also do a bunch of things that aren't quite possible (or certainly not easily) with current web servers. For example:

* minification (which I've cited in my article) -- besides compression, one should also employ HTML / CSS / JS and other asset minification; none of the classical web servers support this; there is something like <https://www.modpagespeed.com/>, but it's far from straightforward to deploy (let alone on a shared web-host;)

* when it comes to headers (be it the ones for CSP and other security related ones) or even `Link` headers for preloading, these aren't easy to configure, especially if you need those `Link` headers only for some HTML pages and not all resources; in this regard I don't know how many shared webhosts actually allow you to tinker with these;

The point I was trying to make is that if you want to deploy a professional (as in performant) static web site, just throwing some files in a folder and pointing Apache or Nginx at them isn't enough. If the performance you are getting by default from such a setup is enough for you, then perfect! If not there is a lot of pain getting everything to work properly.